For personal protection, hand washing is of course essential, but for health care personal and others subjected to virus containing environments, there are masks and respirators. Facemasks or surgical masks are mostly loose fitting disposable masks stopping droplets and skin or hair particles, and prevent splashes from contacting the face of the wearer, but they are no good for virus protection e.g. because of sealing problems against the face, and a negative pressure inside the mask during inhalation. Respirators, and in this context air-purifying respirators are air filtering devices that protect against inhalation of both large and small particles by removing contaminants by filtration or absorption. They may be passive, APR, or powered, PAPR.
The PAPRs of today have a great advantage over APRs, because they only require a simple fit test, and they do not increase the work of breathing. However, because of growth of beard, wrinkles etc. it is difficult to obtain a perfect sealing against the face. These problems are set aside by providing a positive pressure inside the face mask. However, there are also a number of disadvantages with today's PAPRs, they require special training to put on, to use safely and to take off; fan noise impedes conversation; it is difficult to use a stethoscope. They may cause claustrophobia.
Made of thick rubber or other sound restricting material, they make conversation difficult and therefore require special amplifiers or speech diaphragms, and telephone conversation is virtually impossible.
Another great disadvantage is that it is very difficult to see were you put your feet because of the restricted field of vision when looking down, especially when remounting a staircase.
Still another disadvantage is that the weight of existing PAPRs is considerable, causing a lot of strain on the neck, and they are therefore quit uncomfortable for a normal human being, such as nurses, doctors, etc.
Therefore, there is a great need of improvements of existing PAPRs. Also in other areas there is always a need for comfortable easy-to-use safety equipment with improved performance.